With Linux, City of Barcelona aims to help local IT talent

After city of Munich announced to go back to windows, Linux sees positive sign, with City of Barcelona showing confidence in open source. The Barcelona city administration has announced complete migration to open source i.e. Linux and has prepared a roadmap for the same. According to a report in a Spanish newspaper, ‘El País’, the City of Barcelona is in the process of migrating its computer system to Open Source technologies.

The migration aims to help the local IT talent. To achieve the same, the City of Barcelona will start outsourcing IT projects to local small and medium sized enterprises. They will also be taking in 65 new developers to build software programs for their specific needs.

The news report further detailed that the city plans to first replace all its user applications with alternative open source applications. This will go on until the only remaining proprietary software will be Windows where it will finally be replaced with a Linux distribution.

The timeline targeted by the city to go open source is by Spring 2019. The city plans for 70% of its software budget to be invested in open source software in the coming year. The transition period, according to Francesca Bria (Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council) will be completed before the mandate of the present administrators come to an end in Spring 2019.

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